


ROY G. BIV

by brinn



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-05 00:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/brinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>rainbow:  an arc of spectral colors, as produced by a prism or by iridescence. (nick, cassie, post-movie)<br/>adult language</p>
            </blockquote>





	ROY G. BIV

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kayim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayim/gifts).



ROY G. BIV

"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows."   
\- Leonard Cohen

The woman in the hospital gown leans over to pick up the plastic spoon she dropped, her long hair hanging down over her face and sweeping along the smooth tile of the floor. The attending nurse is speaking in low tones to the guard on the other side of the room, and so neither of them sees the tiny glass bead that rolls past their feet and into the hall, coming to rest in the door jam of the room across the way.

 

The woman smiles over her plate, thinks of dominoes, butterflies, hurricanes. It's always a choice.

1\. "You need to take some fucking _art classes_ if we're gonna save the world's collective ass," Nick comments blandly from where he is sitting across from Cassie at today's Unnamed Ramen Shack Of Ill-Repute, chin resting heavily on his hand, thick knuckles pushing his lips into an exaggerated pout and making his words come out in a slur.

 

A minute ago she did her highly dramatic, I'm A Watcher, Ask Me How forehead grab and then began scribbling manically at her paper napkin (she'd tried for her notebook first, but her hot pink nails had fumbled and given up in a flash). Hunched down, gargoyle-like, over her latest masterpiece, she kept dragging a violently red colored pencil against the thin, coffee-ringed material until she tore it right down the middle with the dull, flattened point.

 

As far as he can tell it's a cactus that she has decided to wipe off the face of creation with all her repressed teenage _feeeeelings_, courtesy Mr. Colored Pencil, a jagged wash of thick, waxy red nearly obscuring it completely.

 

"Unless we're going to save all the freaks with Cubism. That's cool too."

 

She doesn't seem to hear him, just stares and stares at the mangled napkin in front of her, slate blue eyes glazed and out of focus.

 

There is an suspended moment of absolute calm as she looks up to meet his gaze.

 

And then – fuck.

 

And then she's shoving him out of his seat, spilling chicken broth all over the panic-napkin and _all over his pants_ and he barely has time to yelp for her to _chill the hell out_ before she's screaming at him to close his eyes and spin and run and run and run – "No, no, no, nononono, we can change it," she breathes raggedly – shoving him in all directions with her eyes closed and then –

 

And then he's stumbling into a ladder, falling between its legs, scraping his head, his knuckles, his knees, and then he's flat on his back on damp cement, his head an island of rusty gold in a thick, sluggish stream of bright, bright red.

 

He draws back his hand from where it's trapped under his hip, fingers coated in glossy red paint. He looks up accusingly at Cassie's blank face where she's standing over him, combat boots on either side of his ankles.

 

"I liked this shirt," he grouses as he shoves himself up onto his elbow, scowling impressively.

 

She's silent for a long moment, her eyes flicking from the upended paint can to his scarlet-stained fingers and face, to the colored pencil she's still clutching in one hand.

 

"Oh," she says finally, then turns around and walks back to their table.

 

Nick watches her go, then flops onto his back again, rubbing at his eyes with his knuckles.

2\. It's easier to think about their hypothetical "mission" in terms of the complete and total impossibility of its success. If he assumes they're already beat, it's a lot easier to keep trying to fight.

 

Maybe this is just another manifestation of his lifelong fascination with lost causes and any and everything that is bound to get him punched in the face or otherwise seriously, seriously screwed, but he can't deny that fighting a losing battle still has a certain romance.

 

That's what he tells himself, anyway, as he moves an orange into the air in front of his face. Moving is just like tensing any other muscle, and he feels a twinge he can't quite isolate starting behind his eyes.

 

_We're all dead anyway,_ he assures himself, _So it's no big deal if you can't even rearrange some produce without getting the shakes. We're all dead anyway. It's cool._

 

The orange flies through the air to smack wetly into the wall above Hook's head and spattering the black pages of Cassie's notebook with sticky pulp.

 

"Nice," she drawls, shaking out the pages.

 

"I know," he grins.

3\. "Do you ever get scared?" Cassie asks abruptly while they're packing themselves into a train car. She won't meet his eyes, just wraps her tiny fingers around one of the guard rails and plays with a piece of her hair.

 

Of course he gets scared. He's _always_ scared, always so ready to run and jump and hide that it's become a kind of emotional white noise, just so much adrenaline-fueled static adding to the already significant fuzz cluttering up his brain. Of course he gets scared.

 

"Of what?" he asks diplomatically.

 

"Of what we can do," she says slowly, twisting and twisting the ragged curl of lime-green-on-blonde. "I want to get better," she says forcefully, "I want to be able to tell the difference between blood and fucking _paint_ \- " He tries to interrupt her here, but her husky voice barrels right past him. "My mom could. I _know_ she could. But I think it made her a little crazy." This last part runs out of her mouth at high speed and hangs in the air between their heads and the train rattles along, jostling people's shoulder's and backpacks into them.

 

"Cass, we're _all_ already a little crazy." _They've already lost._ "You don't have to worry about it happening to you, or me, or anyone - it happened way before Division, kiddo. Embrace the crazy. It's already there."

 

_They've already lost. So they might as well enjoy it._

 

A small smile works its way onto her face before she can flip up her hood to hide it from him.

4\. They're walking by the docks, with Hook in tow, around dusk when Cassie rubs hard at her temples before muttering a supremely sullen, "Fuck."

 

"Don't say fuck," Nick says automatically (he is legit the worst role model in the whole entire world), one big hand flopping down onto her head to ruffle her tie-dyed hair.

 

She shoves him off, jabbing one of her little malnourished elbows into his side (_bitch_), and stalks off to one of the storehouses they're walking past. She stands hipshot with her arms crossed over her chest and sporting a scowl he's sure she picked up from him (_THE worst_).

 

"What the hell was that for?" He yells after her, rubbing at his perpetually bruised ribcage (bitch bitch _bitch_) and sneering at Hook's obvious amusement at his suffering.

 

"Wait for it," she calls over her shoulder. They do, not bothering to swap glances anymore, since precognitive cattiness is kind of Cassie's thing.

 

Kira steps out of alley, all coy smiles and smooth hair. Nick blinks several times, stares, grins. Hook rolls his eyes. Cassie makes a vague gesture with one hand and stomps off to look at the water, and calls "Don't say I didn't warn you!" over the shoulder with her bag strapped across it.

 

"What did she warn you about?" Kira says in her monotone purr as she sidles up to him, hooks two finger in his belt loop.

 

"No idea," he answers, smiling and stupid and twelve years old.

 

Hook just rolls his eyes again and goes off to join Cassie.

5\. Two months later Nick shoves open the door to the tiny apartment the three of them have been sharing. It hits the blue wall hard and the knob smashes a dent into the drywall, and he's too pissed off and raw and _embarrassed_ to notice that he did it without ever touching the thing.

 

"You knew. You had to have known - you had to have _seen_ that she was gonna do that," he shouts at Cassie, ignoring Hook and Pinky and the serious looks they are giving him over their coffee mugs.

 

Cassie doesn't look nearly as smug as he wants her to, since it'd be easier to throw her straight into the harbor if she would at least consent to be a brat about this. Christ knew Kira sure had.

 

"Trust me, I _wish_ I could un-see that. It was all kinds of gross." She goes back to shading in a picture of two dice in her notebook, and if he weren't actively fighting the urge to strangle her, he'd be impressed by how much her grasp of dimension has improved.

 

"You saw her leaving me for some Cantonese Shifter with a goatee and _that's_ all you have to say for yourself?!" he yells, throwing his arms up and inadvertently sending the coffee table flying upwards, while three used plates shatter against the ceiling.

 

Cassie throws her pen down with an air of finality and says very, _very_ slowly, "What did I tell you about the future, Nick? It was _her_ future, _she_ made it, not me. Get over yourself."

 

She shoves her chair away from the table and stomps into her room, the carefully rendered dice showing snake eyes, and Pinky and Hook glaring at him in exasperation.

 

"The lady has a point, Nick," Pinky points out, pointing at him with his three fingers. Nick slams the door again on his way out, with his hands this time.

6\. Four months earlier, they're crashing in the houseboat of some guy Nick knows from forever ago. "Why can't you just _watch_ for who's got what cards?" Nick groans from where he's sprawled on the dirty couch that smells like fish. "As far as cheating at poker goes, that seems like a much more efficient approach than me moving the cards around in the deck."

 

"Because," Cassie answers distractedly from where she's dying her hair again in the bathroom, "Like I _told_ you, it's a game of chance. There are no decisions involved in who gets what cards. So the only way to predict who's gonna win, is if someone already decided to cheat."

 

"The future is just a series of choices," she adds over the sound of the sink running, in a way that makes him think she's quoting.

He pulls a pillow over his face and groans.

7\. Nick and Hook duck down behind a dumpster as another Mover sends a packing crate hurtling into the wall where they were standing a second ago. He throws up his hands instinctively and an array of shrapnel bounces harmlessly onto the ground and rolls away from them.

 

"This is bad," Hook points out unnecessarily. "This is really, really bad."

 

Nick sneaks a look around the edge of the dumpster, trying to get a headcount on how many people are trying to kill them today and gets a bicycle thrown at his head for his trouble. "It usually is," he pants, shoving a row of cinder blocks in the general direction of That Way.

 

"No, Nick - " Hook is sweating, and closes his eyes while he draws a shaky breath. "Nick, I don't think we can win this."

 

_We've already lost_, he thinks, _We're already dead._

 

_We're already dead, so why not live a little?_

 

He just ducks down again and grins.

 

"The future is a series of choices," he grunts back, pushing himself upright and bracing both hands in front of him, the familiar twinge building like a hurricane behind his eyes. He opens his hands and _shoves_ and the entire wall across the way buckles and caves in a shower of glass and brick dust.

The woman in the hospital gown sits up suddenly in bed, wraps a shank of dirty hair around her fingers, smiles. "Are you alright, Ms. Holmes?" the nurse asks disinterestedly. "Dominoes," the woman says cryptically, "He's getting it."

"Yes, Ms. Holmes," the nurse answers with a meaningful look at the wall clock.

Two floors down and three doors to the left, a glass bead catches the light and casts a tiny prism of color onto the dirty linoleum, each color precise and defined and always, always in the right order.


End file.
